IT’S ALL RELATIVE. REALLY?

Every few years I encounter an argument that claims what we call reality is a constructed consensus among those who claim to be experts.  In recent history it goes back to the popularization of Einstein’s analysis of the difficulty of knowing who is moving in space. We note this when we are taking a subway ride and another train is moving alongside.  It becomes confusing: are we stationary and they are moving or are we both moving or are we moving and the other train is stationary?  Which one of is going forward and which is going backward?  Without a fixed reference it may not be possible to tell.  I agree with Einstein’s paradox about motion in space.  But consider the following applications of relativity to specific examples.

1.        Suppose you jump from a plane convinced that you are stationary in space but that the earth is accelerating toward you.  In this situation you believe it is only a state of mind which is happening and you feel a certain satisfaction of the immense concentrated energy you have to make the earth move so rapidly.  Fully confident this is only relative and you are able to control the interpretation, the delusion ends with a splat.

2.        Imagine you are living and raised in poverty and you are told that whether your children will be raised in poverty or wealth is only a matter of your effort to succeed. You alone are master of your fate. You work for a minimum wage and try being a barista at Starbucks and calculate after a few days of work that your work is worth only 8 cups of coffee per day.  You decide that wealth is a relative concept.  Compared to illiterates or semi-literates scavenging garbage heaps in favellas, you are relatively well off.  They would envy you.  You also agree that you are more likely to go to Heaven than most of the wealthy who are doomed by the New Testament warning that for the rich it is harder to get into Heaven than to pass through the eye of a needle (you take that literally, of course).  To your surprise, when you have children, they too are likely to live in poverty.

3.       You are deciding whether to vote in an upcoming election.  You listen to the nightly news and read the newspapers each day and are disillusioned by finding Democrats who are corrupt or Republicans who are corrupt.  Both Democrats and Republicans make promises and don’t keep them. You decide it makes no difference whether you vote or not because all politicians are corrupted by lobbyists. In the election one candidate blames all our problems on inferior people (both immigrant and local degenerates), appeasement of bullying nations, insufficient military action against those who criticize our policies, and labor unions that threaten our economy.  The other candidate seeks diplomacy over military action, more abundant education of our children and youth, government funded programs to protect our health and provide the roads, and a more equitable taxation that does away with loopholes and other legislation favoring the rich and the powerful.  You are told that it’s all relative because the ambitious will do better under the first candidate in a “free society” and the lazy will be rewarded in a socialist type society where people are reduced to parasites sucking the life blood of the nation. You are instead told to vote for the first candidate and wait for a trickle down from the massive amount of wealth generated by that party’s policies.  So you do so.  But the only trickle down that comes is from the tears of laughter of the privileged and powerful who have duped you again. 

SPIRIT, SPIRITUALISM, AND SPIRITUALITY

As a non-dualistic scientist, I do not believe there is evidence for a supernatural world of spirits, ghosts, leprechauns, trolls, zombies, souls, gods, angels, genies, pixies, or bogeymen.  But I do believe there is something called “team spirit.”  It is the coordinated effort that a group of people feel when they accomplish something good through their supplementary talents. It is not a diffuse soul-like being that permeates each member of a team.  I think also of Dickens’s spirits of Christmas past, present, and future.  Are they triplets?  Are they a trinity of one spirit of Christmas, like a Catholic Trinity?  Is this the way that new religions form (there is no scriptural basis for the three Dickensian spirits)?  I am less convinced that there is a “spirit of the times.”  I have no objection to say a musician’s performance was spirited but I do not believe that attainment involved the musician’s possession by a supernatural musical spirit invading his or her brain.

              The term spiritualism was introduced in the nineteenth century to describe a movement that involved séances with table rapping, objects moved in darkened rooms, voices from the dead conjured up by a spiritualist leading the séance, or apparitions appearing and disappearing (luminescent figures appearing for brief moments).  Most of these were outright fraudulent staged productions that took in many intellectuals like Conan Doyle.  They were very popular in Great Britain and the United States from the mid nineteenth to early twentieth century.  Professional magicians like Houdini exposed these as fraudulent.  Those who believed they could converse with past ancestors thought they were studying the supernatural by scientific methods.  These were often the hand holding or table turning procedures alleged to bring the spirits into the séance.

              The term spirituality is more widespread and difficult to define.  It can be an “oversoul” similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s beliefs in his transcendental movement.  It verges on pantheism, with a sense of the holy or divine permeating the universe or individuals.  It is often associated with the sense of awe or wonder when people look at natural beauty such as the Grand Canyon or a vista from a mountain rest stop. At sea it can be an “oceanic” feeling when seeing nothing but a circular sea around the ship and clouds curved like they were painted on the rim of the inside of a clear glass bowl.  It is also associated with the feeling of reverence, communion, or peace that is evoked by a choir or by a sermon in religious services.  Many feel they are experiencing some contact with God.  Others settle for a sense of spirituality that takes them away from the ordinary secular likes and dislikes experienced each day.  I have rarely felt this at Unitarian-Universalist services.  I experience awe and thrill at the beauty found in nature.  I can be “transported” by great music, literature,  or art.  In my youth I read a lot of religious books to see what others liked about the religious experience and I once induced a state of satori in which my fingers felt fused with the universe through the brass gate of my elevator door while waiting to descend to pick up passengers at 217 Broadway in Manhattan.  The signal to move down quickly dispersed that moment of being at one with the universe.  I felt like Scrooge blaming it on an undigested bit of gruel.  In my case it was caused by saturation from reading the trance-like religious experiences of Sri Ramakrishna.

              Dualists try to compartmentalize the natural world and the supernatural world but it is a difficult thing for most scientists to do.  How do supernatural entities bring about natural objects like humans so that they can guide human behavior?  How do they perform miracles?  Few dualists believe that all their activities and experiences are creations of God or spirits or even their own souls.  It is a selective process and no doubt an attempt to inventory what is attributed to supernatural beings or forces and what are ordinary secular activities (like walking, dressing, eating) would vary from individual to individual.  Virtually all of my life has been an immersion in the material world and the emotional constructions of my brain.  I have rarely sought spiritual experiences and yet consider my life fulfilled, ethical, and worth living in the absence of the supernatural.  

MY RESPONSE TO THE THREE QUESTIONS RELIGIONS ASK

ANSWERING THE THREE QUESTIONS THAT RELIGION ASKS

Who am I?

I am a human being and, with 7 billion others, I belong to the species Homo sapiens. That makes me a primate, a mammal, a vertebrate, and a deuterostome among the living animals.  I am a coordinated mass of 3 trillion cells that trace their origin to the union of one of my father’s sperm and one of my mother’s eggs.  I have a unique genotype shared by no other person, past or present.  That genotype is found among the 46 chromosomes of my karyotype --  46,XY  -- as a collection of about 20,000 genes capable of forming proteins to build my cells, tissues, and organs.  Those genes are regulated by largely unknown associations with RNA produced by the rest of the DNA found in my karyotype.  About 100 billion cells are reserved for my brain which generates my sensory interpretations of the environment, my responses to them, and my identity as a person.   My Y chromosome makes me a male.  My narrative so far makes me a scientist, more specifically, a biologist.

       I am mortal and so far have lived 84 years in a social life that makes me Caucasian in my European ancestry, Scandinavian in my paternal ancestry, Eastern European in my maternal ancestry, American in my citizenship, a Brooklyn born New Yorker in my growing up years, and the son of a working class father who was a merchant mariner before he settled in the US as an elevator operator.  My mother was from New Jersey and psychotic, which made me self-reliant to accommodate her mood shifts.  I had a brother who had a congenital heart condition and a half brother and half sister from my mother’s first marriage whom we rarely saw while growing up.

       I am a father of five children, a grandfather of 12, and great grandfather of 3.  I have been married twice.  My first wife, Helen, died at 43 of lung cancer.  My present wife of 57 married years,  Nedra, I cherish and adore.  I am a geneticist and historian of science, receiving my PhD in 1958 at Indiana University and I now consider myself a full time writer in my retirement years.

Why am I here?

I had no conscious role in uniting the sperm of my father that encountered my mother’s egg sometime in mid-October of 1930 that led to my birth nine months later on July 15, 1931.  Nor do I have any awareness of my gestation or birth.  My earliest recollection of childhood was when I was about 2 or 3 years old and I placed a wash basin over my back and crawled like a turtle.  I am here because my mother said “no” when my father asked her, in the Depression, if she wanted to abort their unplanned pregnancy with my embryonic status measured by a skipped period.  I respected my father for his concern and I respected my mother for her choice when I learned of their decision some 20 years after I was born.

              I am here because my karyotype was normal, my implantation took, I was born healthy, and I was living in a country where famine was rare.  I was living in an era that understood the germ theory of infectious diseases and benefitted from the vaccines available.  I am here because I was born in 1931 which made me too young to be drafted in World War II; and in the next decade, at an age to be exempt from military service because I was in college.  By the time I finished my PhD, I was exempt as a father.

              I am here because I am lucky I escaped injury or death from collisions narrowly missed, from accidents avoided at the last second, and from a flight I might have boarded earlier but decided not to take, and which crashed after takeoff from Chicago. My mentor, H. J. Muller called it “life the lucky” and I believe most people have had narrow escapes from death or profound injury.

              It is not just luck, however.  I never smoked tobacco, avoided substance abuse, lived a cautious life, and benefitted from my life as an intellectual.  My field also made me cautious on risk-taking as an adult.

How then should I live?

              I have been an atheist all my conscious life.   Neither of my parents appreciated their religious upbringing.  My father rejected Lutheranism as a child and became an atheist.  My mother was disowned by her relatives for marrying a non-Jew. She abandoned most of its kosher habits had a vague sense of a God but never conferred Jewish traditions or religion on us.

              From my father I learned to appreciate a love of reading and of thinking independently.  From my mother I learned to appreciate museums because she regularly took my brother and me to the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  On rainy days we drew and painted.  My father bought the Encyclopedia Britannica on an installment plan.  I read voraciously from it over the years, randomly discovering topics I did not know existed.  My mother played about an hour a day for us on her violin so we were early introduced to classical music (mostly of the Boston Pops type).  Later our father bought a phonograph and we learned to enjoy listening to opera.  In school I excelled and teachers encouraged me.  I liked art and science but chose genetics when I was in 10^th grade in high school.  I won a full tuition scholarship to NYU.  I majored in biology and minored in history.  I went to graduate school at Indiana University to study with Nobelist H. J. Muller.  I learned what it is like to be totally immersed in a scholarly field and the pleasure of designing and carrying out experiments,  I learned how Muller thought and shared his concerns for the unintended harmful  consequences of the misuses of science in society.

              I became a Unitarian in 1961 and liked its emphasis on social justice, appreciation of reason and science, rejection of the supernatural explanations when rational ones exist, and its belief that we can make a better world than we experienced.

              I learned to communicate science to non-science majors.  I taught my students how science permeates their lives and how to live with that new knowledge and used it wisely for our reproduction, health, and the quality of the world we live in.  I called my Biology 101-102 course “Biology, a Humanities Approach” because, like the humanities, the life sciences reveal what it means to be human.

              I liked being responsible for my behavior and using my empathy to help others when opportunity permitted.  Life is a gift.  I am thankful to have experienced it, to have learned from it, to have atoned for my mistakes and failures, and in some small measure, to have contributed to it.

Elof Axel Carlson

December 5, 2015